All posts by Diana Zea

“Extensive Remodeling”

I wish I could have read the article “Beautiful Brains” two weeks ago, before I had a very relevant conversation with my sister in law about her 14 year old child. Our kids are very close as cousins and in ages, but the fact that my older child is two years younger than hers, and that they are both boys, it really makes me have this spectator’s view towards everything she narrates descriptively about her teenage boy. She usually thinks I’m just listening and sympathizing with her, when I’m actually listening and terrifying myself with what may come my way. Continue reading “Extensive Remodeling”

I got two at home… in different decades

“With the foundation in place, we look forward to the next decade or research, which will deepen our knowledge and understanding of adolescence and of young people in the life course within a rapidly changing world”. (Johnson et all, 2011)
I am a mother of two kids. A boy who’s twelve and a girl who’s 7, so this study, and particularly this ending, was simply a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from be cause I had to find hope. When the decade of research they are waiting for comes (keep in mind the research was published seven years ago), it might be too late to stop whatever it is I’m doing wrong! if there is such a thing. Not so great for a hopeful ending of the article.
Here is what I can connect, though: Whatever my twelve year old is doing, affects my seven year old in ways I cannot begin to imagine, but that I can see every single day, specially because lately, we only have the four of us. If I though it was scary being a teenager in my unmentionable second decade, I had no clue. Watching unstoppable adolescence come on the way of your offsprings and not being able to blink, that’s true suspense. Think about that when you throw harmless conditional sentences about becoming a parent to the air.

“It doesn’t sound like my kid at all”

“Children and adults are never solitary individuals, immune to the social and cultural forces around them.”

I have worked in a few private schools back home with different age groups and different types of families. However, at least in three of these schools, I’ve had a conversation with parents about their kid, where the title of this post will come up: “That doesn’t sound like my kid at all”; “I’m speechless. It’s the first time I hear such behaviors”. Later on (guilty of charge) teachers in the meeting gather to give feedback from the meaning, to exchange how impossible this sounds. One may argue that it is impossible that the kid, as center of a discussion, has never shown a particular behavior that seems common in school. Continue reading “It doesn’t sound like my kid at all”

“Now,… imagine she’s white”

The title of this post, is the last sentence taken from a famous trial closing statement in the movie “A Time to Kill”(1996) directed by Joel Schumacher. The lawyer is defending Carl Lee Hailey, a Black man who avenges the brutal rape of her ten year old daughter, by shooting the men who committed the crime. The movie came back to me repeatedly during the reading “Beginning and ending with Black suffering” (Dumas, 2018), mainly because of this idea of going beyond empathy caused by the misfortunes of a community that, though it’s right here, is foreign to the observers. Continue reading “Now,… imagine she’s white”